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In EA, architecture principles set a framework for making architectural decisions. They help to establish a common understanding across different groups of stakeholders, and provide guidance for portfolios and projects. Michael Durso of the LSE gave a good introduction to the idea in a webinar last week for the UCISA EA community.

Many organisations take the TOGAF architecture principles as a starting point. These are based on the four architectural domains of TOGAF: business, information/data, applications, technology/infrastructure. These principles tend to describe what should be done, e.g. re-use applications, buy in software rather than build it, keep data secure. See for example the principles adopted at Plymouth University and the University of Birmingham.

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One of my goals since starting this job two years ago has always been to create a repository for architecture documents. The idea is to have a central store where people can find information about the University's applications, data sources, business processes, and other architectural information. This store will make it easier for us to explain our plans, to show the current state of the University's information systems, and to explain what Enterprise Architecture is all about.

It's taken a long time to reach this goal, mainly because we're often had more pressing and immediate work to be done. The creation of a repository is one of those tasks that is very important but never quite urgent. So I'm now very happy to say that we are in the process of deploying a repository and modelling tool.

This is the culmination of a careful process to select the most appropriate tool for our needs. We began by organising several workshops to gather requirements from a rang…

I notice that in 2016 I wrote 34 posts on this blog. This is only my fifth post in 2017 and we're already three-quarters of the way through the year. Either I've suddenly got lazier, or else I've had less time to spend writing here. As I'm not inclined to think of myself as especially lazy, I'm plumping for the latter explanation.

There really is a lot going on. The University has several major initiatives under way, many of which need input from the Enterprise Architecture section.

The Service Excellence programme is overhauling (the buzzword is "transforming") our administrative processes for HR, Finance, and Student Administration. Linked to this is a programme to procure an integrated ERP system to replace the adminstrative IT systems.

Enabling Digital Transformation is a programme to put the middleware and architecture in place so that we can make our processes "digital first". We're implementing an API framework, a notification…

About Me

Work: I am the Enterprise Architect in the Information Systems group of the University of Edinburgh.
Play: I like board games, particularly those in the 18xx family; music, although I don't play myself; and reading, especially science fiction.